Trinity students get new perspective on sports

With goggles on and arms and legs spread out, the Kentucky School for the Blind visited Trinity Lutheran School in Edwardsville on Friday, to show students how to play goalball, a paraolympic sport.

Using only goggles, kneepads, and a goalball, three players lined each side of the court — two wings and one center. The object of the game is to roll the ball across to the other team in a bowling motion, and have the ball pass through the three opposing team members and score a point, or goal.

Players defending the ball are able to stop it only by sprawling out and raising arms up as they lay on their sides.

The audience is silenced before each round so that players are able to hear the ball approaching them.

Coach of the Kentucky School for the Blind’s goalball team Bo Mullins said the main reason behind the team’s visit is to show the sighted community the team’s capabilities, despite misconceptions.

“You can show visually impaired people they are able to go out into the real world and do things. This is just one example. At the school for the blind, we go out and do these demonstrations all the time to kind of pass our message along that blind people are capable. When the students here go, they get their own jobs and things like that, they run into a blind person and they’ll think back to this,” he said.

The team is making their way to Missouri to compete in the North Central Association of Schools for the Blind’s (NCASB) Goalball conference at the Missouri School for the Blind over the weekend. After one of their assistant coaches got in contact with the school, the team made the trip early to visit Trinity Lutheran.

Mullins said he’s been coaching the team for 10 years and it’s been rewarding so far.

“Goalball — it’s really the only team sport you can play as a blind person. You meet all kinds of interesting people, you can go to tournaments all over the United States and all over the world. Anybody can play goalball; you don’t have to be athletic, you just have to be willing to get hit by a ball,” he said.

This isn’t the first time the Kentucky School for the Blind has shown what goalball is all about to students, and Mullins said he hopes student participants can truly see the potential of the blind community.

“(We want them to see) that it’s fun and that blind people are not like whatever stereotype they have on blind people. We’ve improved upon that. The interaction between the sighted public and our students, that just moves them forward in life. They can make connections and we’ve hopefully changed how people look at blind people in the future when they meet them,” Mullins said.

Trinity students in seventh and eighth grade participated in the games, as well as parents and staff members. Principal Wes Jones, one of the participants, said the games were important to everyone involved.

“I think it was just as important to see the sport, but it was also just the different interactions that they could have with people who they wouldn’t interact with on a daily basis. Just to see some of the different things that can be done with accommodations - ways to help out our neighbor, no matter what they are, no matter if they have any kind of special abilities or any needs for that. So it was just a great opportunity, Mr. (Ed) Cook set it all up and our parent/teacher league pretty much paid to get them here a day early so they could go to their tournament. Just all of those things,” Jones said.

This was the first time the school visited, and Jones said students prepared for this weeks in advance to get a feel for the sport ahead of time.

“(The students) wore the blindfolds around school more than anything else. So they went from a class to lunch, and they were just starting to learn their environment. We had a couple called-in practices but we didn’t even have the floor down for it. Just them getting used to hearing the ball rolling,” Jones said.

After playing a round of goalball, Jones said ultimately he hopes all students, staff, and parents could truly see the potential of the Kentucky students.

“I hope they will just take away that though the sighted have certain abilities and the unsighted don’t, there are so many ways that we can use the gifts that God has given us. You saw how well some of the unsighted players are able to play and how much better they are than our sighted…This is going to be one of my favorite parts here is that our kids are going to eat together in the cafeteria and just that interaction right there. So I really hope they take that away and see it for the rest of their life,” Jones said.

Going forward, Jones said, “I would love to set this up more often. If we could do this again in another year or in a couple years down the line, that would be terrific.”

For more information about the Kentucky School for the Blind, visit www.ksb.k12.ky.us.